


all the pretty little horses

by tomato_greens



Series: something incredible waiting to be known [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Child Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-16
Updated: 2011-03-16
Packaged: 2017-10-17 00:42:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They come home and it's a shock, to see that the world hasn't tilted off its axis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the pretty little horses

**Author's Note:**

> From [this prompt](http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/17669.html?thread=37476869#t37476869) on the kink meme. Warning: death of an infant due to SIDS and some immediate consequences of that.

When Arthur's sister comes to them, crying, one hand low on her belly and the other ceaselessly twisting her fiancé's dog tags, Eames hugs her and Arthur makes her cups of weak tea.

"I can't tell him," she says, "I can't. It was a one-night thing, I can't ruin us because of a stupid mistake."

Arthur looks at the soft bulge of her belly. "That's a pretty big mistake to be calling a mistake."

"I can't raise a child," she says, putting her head in her hands. "I don't know what to do. I don't know what I was thinking."

Arthur shakes his head, wordless.

Eames lets go of her hand and clears his throat. "Let's consider the options," he says.

-

They talk about it, but, really, it's a foregone conclusion.

-

They name her Lila Jane Smith (the first after Arthur's grandmother, the second after Eames's, and the third since they definitely can't give her either of their last names and, as Eames says, chucking her ever so gently under the chin and cooing, she's definitely already got the sense of humor to appreciate it). She is seven pounds and four ounces, with ten fingers and ten toes and the bluest eyes Arthur's ever seen, all ruddy cheeks and very fine, darkly curling hair.

"Be careful with her, she's going to be a heartbreaker," says Carla, the nurse who's been seeing them through this since they checked in.

"Like her mother," Arthur murmurs, and Carla laughs.

They bundle her up––Arthur counts her fingers and toes as he does so, just in case one's gone missing or something, but of course one hasn't; she's as perfect as she's been since she screamed that first bloodcurdling scream––and say lengthy good-byes to Arthur's sister, who's being attended to by two of her friends.

"Bye bye, Lily," she says, kissing her on the forehead.

Arthur almost corrects her but lets the moment ring and hang in the air instead, a shimmering glimpse of what might have been. "Bye," he says, after, squeezing her around the shoulders.

"Good bye, darling," Eames says, giving her a squeeze of his own, "do call, all right? We'll send you pictures."

She smiles, a little on the watery side, and promises to keep in touch.

Eames puts one hand on Arthur's elbow and leads the three of them out.

-

Arthur is secretly terrified for the first three months that something terrible is going to happen, but nothing does, and nothing does, and Lila just keeps getting bigger, her ten perfect fingers and ten perfect toes learning how to grasp at things clumsily. She starts making sounds and is thrilled whenever either of them gets out the Tweety Bird puppet.

"Send me photos," Arthur's sister says on the phone––she's waived parental rights but, as she says, Lila's her niece and she's got perfect rights to demand photo shoots––and so they do, picture after picture after picture, Lila smiling and sleeping and clutching at a bottle like a lifeline.

They don't get a lot of sleep, but then, neither of them has been used to a regular sleep schedule for years.

-

Lila's a quick mover; she's not yet six months old when she starts dragging herself by her forearms, slithering across their scrubbed kitchen floor on her belly. She creeps up to Eames one day and holds onto his foot, Arthur covering a smile with one hand.

"That's my girl," Eames says, lifting and swooping her around to shrieks of laughter, kissing her on the nose. "That's my best precocious delightful girl."

"Be careful," Arthur says, but of course he does the same thing whenever she wants it––anything to make her smile.

-

Neither of them has taken a job since just before Lila's birth outside of the occasional research-from-home gig, but they're getting offers, both of them, and eventually Eames gets antsy enough to pick one up. "It's quick," he promises, kissing Arthur lingeringly on the mouth and pecking Lila on the cheek. "I'll be back in a couple weeks."

Lila cries and sucks on her frozen bagel. Arthur knows that technically she's probably mostly upset because of the tooth that's just starting to peek through her gums, but he wouldn't blame her if it weren't the only reason.

"It's not that I don't love you," he tells her, "because I do, I love you more than nearly anything. More than my career. More than Dom. Definitely more than Eames."

Lila keeps weeping the tears of the betrayed.

"I might like to get out of the house, though," he admits.

Lila wails, commiserating.

Arthur sighs and gets out Tweety Bird. Somehow Lila ends up sucking on his beak, but she's not crying anymore, so Arthur deems it a success.

-

Eames comes back a little tanner and a little richer while both Lila and Arthur are asleep, Lila snuggled up with the soft blanket Arthur's sister made her that they have only recently let her have in the crib, and Arthur stretched out like a starfish on their bed, limbs akimbo. He wakes up when Eames pads in and kisses his neck, cold from the air outside, the nearly-pleasant scratch of stubble rough on his collarbone.

"Hi," Arthur whispers, smiling, twining his arms around Eames's neck. "Don't wake the baby up."

"I would never," Eames whispers back, affronted for about two seconds before he drops the pose and kisses Arthur again, thumbing his jaw. "I am both efficient and silent, like a ninja." He kisses the side of Arthur's nose. "A sexual ninja, of course."

Arthur snorts softly and nips at Eames's lips. "Sure," he says, then hits Eames on the shoulder. "Move over, I want to get up."

Eames leans back and raises an eyebrow. "What?"

"Unless you want me to welcome you home in front of our daughter, I suggest you let go of my person," says Arthur warningly. "You only get twenty minutes, so choose wisely."

Eames grins and lets go; Arthur scoots off the bed and checks in at Lila's crib before dragging Eames by the hand to the bathroom, where they finish in more like ten minutes and are back in record time. Eames stops by the crib on the way back and tugs her a little more firmly onto her back before he climbs into the bed.

"Missed you," Arthur says, biting the tip of Eames's nose. "Lila did too. I'm sure she'll tell you at great length in about two hours."

"I see having just come home isn't enough of an excuse to get out of midnight snack duty," Eames sighs.

Arthur shrugs without mercy. "You were off gallivanting and gambling and seducing men left and right," he says. "This is what you get for having fun on the job."

"Your dreadful espionage skills astound me as always," Eames answers, "I had no fun whatsoever and was pining the entire time."

"I'm sure," Arthur says, raising an eyebrow. "You do love theatrics."

Eames tugs Arthur closer until they'd be spooning if they weren't face-to-face. As it is, Arthur tucks his nose into the crook of Eames's shoulder for sheer self-protection. "Forgive me for my self-indulgences," Eames says quietly.

"Never. I detest you," Arthur insists, and turns around in Eames's arms so he can breathe properly. "Good night."

"Good night, sweetheart," Eames says.

Arthur is too busy determinedly sleeping to protest the endearment, but he does happen to catch the skin of Eames's knuckles between his fingernails before drifting off the rest of the way.

-

Arthur wakes up feeling weirdly rested. He guesses Eames got up with Lila but it's unusual that he doesn't even stir––he must have really been feeling the effects of single-parenthood.

Eames is back in the bed now, curled around Arthur like he never even left, and Arthur soaks in the beautiful silence of the morning before he realizes he can't hear Lila's little breaths over the baby monitor, which he dutifully uses despite the fact that she's usually less than ten feet away from them.

He has a brief moment of panic before he checks the monitor; the blue light's off, so he figures it must have run out of battery sometime in the night. Arthur rolls his eyes and takes a deep breath, clearing the terrible choked feeling from his throat: nothing's wrong, it's just Energizer, like most corporations, failing to live up to their end of the bargain. Everything's fine.

Still––he glances at the alarm clock––it's about time for her to be waking up, so he may as well go check on her. Just in case.

(Eames makes fun of Arthur for being a cautious parent, but he can't help it, and anyway, it's not like Eames is any different; he's just better at looking nonchalant.) 

She's still asleep; she's strong enough that she managed to curl over on her belly, so he reaches out to touch her gently, rolling her on her back, stroking over her cheek. She doesn't respond, doesn't move, doesn't so much as breathe out.

"Lila?" he says. She still doesn't move. "Lila!" He picks her up, her body impossibly small and too stiff, her face unevenly pink. "Lila, Lila, baby girl, Lila. Wake up."

"Arthur?" he hears behind him, Eames's voice is husky with sleep and vague worry, but he can't look away from her face, from trying to jostle her awake. "What's wrong?"

Arthur shakes his head. "Wake up," he says again, God help him, shaking her. "Wake up."

Eames comes around to where Arthur is standing in front of the crib and takes her from him. "Lila?" he says, cautiously. "Lila."

"She can't hear you, you're too quiet," Arthur says, frowning. "She sleeps heavily. You know that." Eames stops trying to wake her and just––stands there, frozen, for long minutes. Arthur can't stand it. " _Do_ something, for God's sake," he shouts.

Eames puts her back in her crib.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Arthur yells. "She won't wake up, she won't wake up, why are you leaving her alone?" He turns to pick her up again, but Eames grabs him around the waist, and for all that Arthur's a wiry son of a bitch, Eames is stronger.

Eames walks out of the bedroom, pulling Arthur with him, and closes the bedroom door. He doesn't let go when Arthur punches him in the shoulder or when Arthur elbows him or either of the times Arthur bites him, not even when he draws blood, and he doesn't let go while he phones an ambulance in a conversation Arthur's decidedly not listening to, and he doesn't let go when the EMTs get there and Arthur stops fighting the inevitable.

Lila's gone.

-

They fill out enough paperwork that Arthur almost makes a crack about deforestation on three separate occasions, before he remembers why they're there, why Lila isn't in her stroller beside them, why Eames isn't busy making faces but instead grimly gripping a pen as if it were a knife. It's like getting gutted every time.

"Cremation?" Eames asks.

"God," says Arthur, sickened. "I don't know. Do what you want."

They come home and it's a shock, to see that the world hasn't tilted off its axis. The crib is still neatly in its corner and Lila's toys are still scattered around the living room. Eames, who has always been slightly better at compartmentalizing than Arthur, gathers them up and puts them away, and keeps the door to the bedroom shut.

"I guess we'd better call my sister," Arthur says, a little while later.

"Yeah," Eames says, reaching for the phone without moving anything other than his hand.

Arthur curls into Eames as he dials and puts on speaker phone. They can't seem to let go of each other.

"It's my fault," she keeps crying, "it's my fault. Why did I––why did you––I should never have, I knew that blanket was––it's my––"

In the end Arthur throws the phone so hard it breaks in pieces and sinks down on the couch, head in his hands.

 Eames sits next to him, strokes his hair and kisses his forehead.

"I just want to go to sleep," says Arthur. "I want this to be over."

Eames nods. They don't get off the couch.

-

"We should get a new phone," says Arthur the next day.

Eames nods and finishes arranging the funeral from his cell phone while Arthur naps. They don't have anyone else to get it done.

They don't get off the couch.

-

On the third day, they take a shower together, change their clothes, and go back to the couch. Arthur cries. Eames can't, yet.

Arthur's sister calls them until Eames's battery runs out. Arthur doesn't know where he put his phone.

-

The other receiver for the landline rings.

"Fuck, what do you want?" Arthur asks. It's the first time back in the bedroom since it happened and seeing their unmade bed is like a punch to the throat. "We don't need your fucking guilt or anymore goddamn condolences, nothing you say about your stupid blanket or your fucking fiancé is going to bring her back, so I wish you'd just stop calling us."

"...Arthur?" says Cobb.

"Well, shit," Arthur says. "Hi," he says, struggling to sound normal. "It's been a while. What's up?"

"I needed to ask your opinion on something––are you all right?" he asks.

His voice is so patently cautious that Arthur can't help but laugh bleakly. "No," he says. "What's up?"

Cobb's voice turns momentarily muffled as he calls, "One sec, Phil, I'm on the phone with Uncle Arthur, sweetheart, I'll be right there." He shuffles, then asks, more curious than concerned, "Do you need to talk about it?"

Arthur gives up. "My daughter's dead. What do you want?"

"What?" asks Cobb.

"My daughter," says Arthur. "She's dead."

"What?" says Cobb again. "Lila?"  

"Well, you've certainly gotten slow in your old age," Arthur snaps. "Yes, what other daughters do I––did I have?"

Cobb says, "I'm so sorry. I never––I never even met her."

"Yeah, I know," says Arthur. "I'm sorry for your fucking loss. What do you want, Dom?"

Cobb says, "I don't think it's important anymore, do you?"

Cobb says, "Are you going to be okay? How's Eames?"

Cobb says, "When's the funeral?"

And Arthur could say, "I don't know."

And Arthur could say, "I don't know."

And Arthur could say, "I don't know."

But his throat is so frozen with grief that he can't say even that.

-

"We're going to be okay," he says to Eames during their second attempt at dinner since they came home a few days ago. He started warming a bottle before he remembered and he's still shaken up about it.

Eames nods and pretends to eat. He's shutting down and there's nothing Arthur can do about it.

Arthur never thought he'd have to be the strong one.

-

The landline rings again and again.

Arthur finds his phone and his inbox is full. He deletes without prejudice.

-

The funeral is tiny and lovely. That's what everyone calls it––lovely, like the flowers and the music and the sympathy cards can turn the urn into something other than the ugly reminder that it is.

His sister couldn't make it because she has to pick her fiancé up from the airport three states away. Arthur finds himself oddly relieved.

Eames excuses himself to entertain Phillipa and James, occasionally touching Arthur on the neck or the shoulder or the hand, light and less intimate than a handshake.

Arthur accepts people's sympathy and gives them food in exchange for it, a barter system. Almost no one there had ever met Lila more than once or twice, except for their neighbors; Arthur's irrationally angry about that. No one will ever know Lila, now, no one will ever know her smiles or her moods or the way she would drag herself around like a snake except for Eames and him.

She deserves more than that.

-

"You're going to be okay," Cobb says. "Time heals all things."

"Dom," says Arthur, "I don't know if you remember what you were like for years after Mal died––"

Cobb doesn't even flinch. Fatherhood suits him. "I know," he says. "I know. But Arthur, you will live through this, and so will Eames. It gets better. It will get better."

"Thanks for your flowers," says Arthur, and leaves before he punches Cobb in his smug well-adjusted mouth.

-

When everyone's finally filed out of their house, Eames and Arthur ignore the plates and the misplaced gloves and and shower together.

 _At least we have this_ , Arthur thinks, washing Eames's hair. _They can't take this from us._

Eames turns to him. "You got shampoo in my eye," he says, blinking rapidly, and Arthur holds him as the shower curtains them from the rest of the world, washing them free.


End file.
